Semester Reports and Faculty Managers
Overview
Report administrators can allocate the subject configuration aspect of the report set up process to Faculty Managers. This will mean that the Faculty Manager will be responsible for setting up what is to be reported on for the subjects within their Faculty.
Permissions
Report Administrators will need the ReportsAdmin permission to set up the cycle and they will have access to configure all subjects within the cycle.
Staff who the school has allocated to be Faculty Managers will have access within the reporting cycle to configure any subjects that are included in their Faculty in Compass.
Faculty Managers do not have access to the Cycle Settings, Exports, Imports, or Bulk Actions buttons in the report cycle. Faculty Managers will also not be able to enter results on behalf of anyone else, they can only enter results for subjects they have taught.
Allocated Faculty Managers and Subjects
For information on how Faculties are set up, managers are assigned and subjects are allocated to Faculties, please refer to the 'Faculty Managers' article from our Knowledge Base.
Reporting Administrator - Issuing Subject Configuration for a Cycle to Faculty Managers
For the Faculty Managers to be able to administer subjects within their faculty the report administrator needs to ensure that two things have been done:
- Faculties have been created, and a staff member has been assigned as the Manager of a Faculty.
- The Subjects in Compass have been assigned a Faculty.
For information on accessing this information, please refer to the 'Faculty Managers' article from our Knowledge Base.
How the reporting administrator chooses to allow faculty managers, or learning area leaders, to administer their subjects is entirely up your school's guidelines/process.
Some schools have their Reporting Coordinator create the grading criteria for every subject, and then have the Faculty Managers review them and mark them as Complete. Other schools choose to delegate the task of creating the individual grading criteria to the Faculty Managers. Further explanation on setting up the grading criteria will be provided below.
Primary School ApplicationPrimary schools can make use of the faculty manager functionality by creating year level faculties as well as faculties for the specialist subjects, instead of faculties by learning area. This would allow you to set a year level manager in the system. The year level managers would then be able to assist with the subject setup, for example entering subject description/s and selecting the correct Victorian Curriculum (or similar) grading strands.
Faculty Managers - Configuring your Subjects in a Reporting Cycle
When you have been advised by your Reporting Administrator that the cycle is ready for you to configure the Faculty subjects, go to 'Semester Reports' under the Teaching and Learning menu (pencil icon).
You will see the subjects pertaining to the faculties you are a manager of.
You will need to work through each listed subject to set the relevant grading criteria for the subject.
Click the name of the subject to open the configuration screen for that subject.
Example: School Attendance ElementExample: Subject Description Element
Example: Work Habit Element
Example: Victorian Curriculum Strand Element
Some elements are a tick the box selection, some are free type text fields and others have the option to add components.
If you do not want to include an element in the reports, you can simply leave it blank or choose to not tick any boxes. This will exclude the element from that subject, and the teachers will not see it when they go to write their reports.
There is the option to import subject configuration from a previous cycle and this is the quickest way to set up your reports, but if this is your first semester writing reports on Compass you will need to configure at least one subject before you can import or export the configuration across to other subjects.
For details on how to import subject configuration, please see the below section further down in this article called 'Importing/Exporting Subject Configuration'.
For the elements you need to configure for this subject, expand them and complete the required information.
Example: Configuring a School Attendance ElementTick the applicable option for your subject.
Example: Configuring a Subject Description Element
Add in the text that you want to appear on student reports as the Description for this subject.
Example: Configuring a Victorian Curriculum Element
Use the 'Add New Victorian Curriculum Strand' button to add the required strands that teachers will report against for this subject.
Example: Configuring a Work Habit Element
Use the 'Add New Work Habit' button to add as many Work Habits as required for teachers to report against for the subject. You can free type your own or use an existing option from the drop-down list. Once added, click the edit pencil icon to edit or the red 'X' to delete.
Example: Configuring a Comment Element
Use the 'Add New Comment Section' to add the required comment fields for teachers to report against for the subject. You can free type your own or use an existing option from the drop-down list.
Some schools do just one large comment box, usually titled 'Teacher Comment', and other schools typically do two comments - one being 'What the student has achieved' and the other being 'Areas for Improvement'. You can add as many comment sections as you like.
If you would like to use variables (like studentPreferredName) you can insert a variable by using the '< >' button further to the right
See below for how this should start to look as you set up the subject. In this example, the subject does not require the 'Attitudes and Behaviour' element so it has not had content added and will therefore not show for teachers when they go to enter results for this subject.
If required, you can review the included classes who will be reporting against the subject. You can also review which Learning Tasks are included in the report cycle for the subject.
After entering information on the subject page be sure to click 'Save' at the bottom as you go to retain your settings.
Once you have finished configuring the subject, you can click 'Save and Close' to return to the main Reporting Cycle Administration screen.
Please Note: We recommend Faculty Managers leaving the 'Overall Subject Template Status' set as 'Draft' unless otherwise advised by your Reporting AdministratorFaculty Managers - Importing/Exporting Subject Configuration
If you have set the grading criteria for one subject, either in the current cycle or a previous cycle, and want to copy the same grading criteria across to a different subject, you can use either the 'Import Report Items' or 'Export Report Elements' buttons, found at the top of the Subject Template Setup page, in order to speed up the process of setting up each individual subject.
If you are on the subject setup page of a subject that has not yet been configured then you use should use the 'Import Report Items' button, but the quickest method is to set up one subject and then use the 'Export Report Elements' button to copy this setup across to the other subjects that will report on the same things. Alternatively if you used the same (or a similar) report setup in a previous cycle you can go to the Subject Template Setup page from the previous cycle, and then click the 'Export Report Elements' button to then push some or all of this setup across to subjects in the current cycle.
Tip: Be sure to always click 'Save' at the bottom of the Subject Template Setup page prior to doing an export or import. This ensures any changes you've made will be saved to the system prior to you exporting these settings to another subject.
Export Report Elements
Clicking the 'Export Report Elements' button will open a popup window.
Along the right-hand side under the heading 'Destination' select which reporting cycle you want to copy the information across to. Once you've selected the reporting cycle the list below will fill with the subjects that have been included in that reporting cycle. By default they will all be marked red. From this list you should select the subjects that you want to copy this setup across to by clicking them to turn them green with a tick mark at the far right.
On the left-hand side of the popup, under the heading 'Report Elements' you should select which of the report elements from this subject you want to copy across to the subjects you select on the right.
So you may have added a subject-specific Subject Description reporting element, which is not relevant to any of the other subjects in the cycle. In this case ensure the Subject Description element remains marked red, and it will not be copied across to any other subjects. Although in many cases some of the other grading elements will be reported on by many other subjects, such as the same Comment headings and the same Work Habits elements (e.g. Comments such as 'Teachers Comment' or 'What the student has achieved', and Work Habits like 'Effort' and 'Behaviour). In this case you would ensure the Comments and Work Habits elements are clicked to be green, thus indicating that these are the elements you want copied across to the subjects selected on the right.
Below the 'Report Elements' is a section titled 'Overwrite Mode', this allows you to control how the items you've selected above in green will be pushed across to the subjects selected on the right. If you select the top option, which reads 'Remove existing elements and replace' this will remove any settings already set up for the elements that are green for the subjects on the right that are also marked green, and replace any previous settings with exactly what has been setup on the subjects template you're exporting. This will have no effect on the report elements that have been marked red. Choosing the bottom option, which reads 'Append to existing elements', will result in the settings for the subject template you're exporting being added on to any existing report elements that are already setup on the subjects that are marked as green in the Destination column.
Once you click 'Export' the selected subjects will be updated. You can then click 'Save and Close' at the bottom of the current subject to return to the main page of the reporting cycle. From here you can click into your other subjects to review any configuration aspects as a result of the imported content now in the subjects.
Note: Keep in mind that if you have already created two Work Habits on the Destination subject and append two more to the list, the export process will simply add them on, even if this would result in a duplication such as two Efforts and two Behaviour Work Habit elements. Example: Victorian Primary School Application
For example selecting which Attendance type you'll include, skipping the Subject Description for now, adding in your two Work Habits (Effort and Behaviour), adding in your two Comments (What the student has achieved and Areas for Improvement), adding in the 3 English Victorian Curriculum items, adding in the 3 Mathematics Victorian Curriculum items, and adding in Victorian Curriculum EAL elements if you have EAL students.
Once you've set up one subject using the above format (or whatever format your school has decided upon, the above example is simply indicative of a majority of Victorian primary schools), you can use the Export Report Elements function described above to push these settings across to the other Generalist subjects, thus completing about 80% of your setup in one go.
After exporting these settings to the other Generalist subjects you can then continue to finalise the subject template setup that you're on (for example adding a Subject Description, or if it's a Year 6 Generalist you should add in the additional Victorian Curriculum grading elements you've decided on.)
Similarly if your Specialist subjects are using some of the same grading elements (e.g. the same 2 Work Habits as your Generalist teachers) you can do another export, this time selecting just the Work Habits element, and then push this across to the Specialist subjects.
Thinking through the setup of your other subjects in comparison to one you've already setup, and using the Export Report Elements button, will allow you to quickly setup your reports by minimising the amount of steps you need to repeat on a per-subject basis.
Import Report Items
The Import Report Items function should be used when you're on a subject template setup page that has not been completed, and want to copy into this subject from another already set up subject template.
Click the Import Report Items button to open up a popup window. At the top of the popup window, which you can see in the image below, you should select the Cycle and Subject that you want to copy the report element setup from. You should ensure that you select a subject that is already setup, so there is information to pull across. We will refer to the subject chosen on the Import Report Items window as the 'Source Subject', to differentiate it from the subject whose subject template setup page you were on prior to clicking the 'Import Report Items' button, which we will call the 'Target Subject'.
Under the section titled 'Report Elements' you should select the report elements from the Source Subject that you want to copy across to the Target Subject. If the report element is Green, with a checkmark on the right, it will import into the Target Subject. You can click the element and it will turn red, with a grey X on the right, which indicates that it will be excluded when you import the elements. Elements that are marked as red will not be touched during the import process.
Once you've selected the report elements you want to import you need to select an Overwrite Mode from the two options at the bottom. The first option, which reads “Remove existing items and replace with imported items†will write over any setup you had previously done for the Target Subject for the reporting elements which have been marked as green, and will write over it with the information from the Source Subject. The other option is to "Append to existing items" which would add the setup from the Source Subject to any setup you had already done for the green elements on the Target Subject previously.
Once you have made your selections click the green 'Import' button at the bottom of the screen to complete the import process. This will close the popup window and take you back to your Target Subject. Review the settings on the screen and made any necessary changes, and then click 'Save and Close' at the bottom to return to the Reporting Cycle Administration page.
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